20 Command Line Tools to Monitor Linux Performance

It’s really very tough job for every System or Network administrator to monitor and debug Linux System Performance problems every day. After being a Linux Administrator for 5 years in IT industry, I came to know that how hard is to monitor and keep systems up and running. For this reason, we’ve compiled the list of Top 20 frequently used command line monitoring tools that might be useful for every Linux/Unix System Administrator. These commands are available under all flavors of Linux and can be useful to monitor and find the actual causes of performance problem. This list of commands shown here are very enough for you to pick the one that is suitable for your monitoring scenario.

Linux Command Line Monitoring

1. Top – Linux Process Monitoring

Linux Top command is a performance monitoring program which is used frequently by many system administrators to monitor Linux performance and it is available under many Linux/Unix like operating systems. The top command used to dipslay all the running and active real-time processes in ordered list and updates it regularly. It display CPU usage, Memory usage, Swap Memory, Cache Size, Buffer Size, Process PID, User, Commands and much more. It also shows high memory and cpu utilization of a running processess. The top command is much userful for system administrator to monitor and take correct action when required. Let’s see top command in action.

2. VmStat – Virtual Memory Statistics

Linux VmStat command used to display statistics of virtual memory, kernerl threads, disks, system processes, I/O blocks, interrupts, CPU activity and much more. By default vmstat command is not available under Linux systems you need to install a package called sysstat that includes a vmstat program. The common usage of command format is.

3. Lsof – List Open Files

Lsof command used in many Linux/Unix like system that is used to display list of all the open files and the processes. The open files included are disk files, network sockets, pipes, devices and processes. One of the main reason for using this command is when a disk cannot be unmounted and displays the error that files are being used or opened. With this commmand you can easily identify which files are in use. The most common format for this command is.

4. Tcpdump – Network Packet Analyzer

Tcpdump one of the most widely used command-line network packet analyzer or packets sniffer program that is used capture or filter TCP/IP packets that received or transferred on a specific interface over a network. It also provides a option to save captured packages in a file for later analysis. tcpdump is almost available in all major Linux distributions.

5. Netstat – Network Statistics

Netstat is a command line tool for monitoring incoming and outgoing network packets statistics as well as interface statistics. It is very useful tool for every system administrator to monitor network performance and troubleshoot network related problems.

6. Htop – Linux Process Monitoring

Htop is a much advanced interactive and real time Linux process monitoring tool. This is much similar to Linux top command but it has some rich features like user friendly interface to manage process, shortcut keys, vertical and horizontal view of the processes and much more. Htop is a third party tool and doesn’t included in Linux systems, you need to install it using YUM package manager tool. For more information on installation read our article below.

7. Iotop – Monitor Linux Disk I/O

Iotop is also much similar to top command and Htop program, but it has accounting function to monitor and display real time Disk I/O and processes. This tool is much useful for finding the exact process and high used disk read/writes of the processes.

8. Iostat – Input/Output Statistics

IoStat is simple tool that will collect and show system input and output storage device statistics. This tool is often used to trace storage device performance issues including devices, local disks, remote disks such as NFS.

10. Psacct or Acct – Monitor User Activity

psacct or acct tools are very useful for monitoring each users activity on the system. Both daemons runs in the background and keeps a close watch on the overall activity of each user on the system and also what resources are being consumed by them.

These tools are very useful for system administrators to track each users activity like what they are doing, what commands they issued, how much resources are used by them, how long they are active on the system etc.

12. NetHogs – Monitor Per Process Network Bandwidth

NetHogs is an open source nice small program (similar to Linux top command) that keeps a tab on each process network activity on your system. It also keeps a track of real time network traffic bandwidth used by each program or application.

13. iftop – Network Bandwidth Monitoring

iftop is another terminal-based free open source system monitoring utility that displays a frequently updated list of network bandwidth utilization (source and destination hosts) that passing through the network interface on your system. iftop is considered for network usage, what ‘top‘ does for CPU usage. iftop is a ‘top‘ family tool that monitor a selected interface and displays a current bandwidth usage between two hosts.

14. Monitorix – System and Network Monitoring

Monitorix is a free lightweight utility that is designed to run and monitor system and network resources as many as possible in Linux/Unix servers. It has a built in HTTP web server that regularly collects system and network information and display them in graphs. It Monitors system load average and usage, memory allocation, disk driver health, system services, network ports, mail statistics (Sendmail, Postfix, Dovecot, etc), MySQL statistics and many more. It designed to monitor overall system performance and helps in detecting failures, bottlenecks, abnormal activities etc.

15. Arpwatch – Ethernet Activity Monitor

Arpwatch is a kind of program that is designed to monitor Address Resolution (MAC and IP address changes) of Ethernet network traffic on a Linux network. It continuously keeps watch on Ethernet traffic and produces a log of IP and MAC address pair changes along with a timestamps on a network. It also has a feature to send an email alerts to administrator, when a pairing added or changes. It is very useful in detecting ARP spoofing on a network.

16. Suricata – Network Security Monitoring

Suricata is an high performance open source Network Security and Intrusion Detection and Prevention Monitoring System for Linux, FreeBSD and Windows.It was designed and owned by a non-profit foundation OISF (Open Information Security Foundation).

17. VnStat PHP – Monitoring Network Bandwidth

VnStat PHP a web based frontend application for most popular networking tool called “vnstat“. VnStat PHP monitors a network traffic usage in nicely graphical mode. It displays a total IN and OUT network traffic usage in hourly, daily, monthly and full summary report.

18. Nagios – Network/Server Monitoring

Nagios is an leading open source powerful monitoring system that enables network/system administrators to identify and resolve server related problems before they affect major business processes. With the Nagios system, administrators can able to monitor remote Linux, Windows, Switches, Routers and Printers on a single window. It shows critical warnings and indicates if something went wrong in your network/server which indirectly helps you to begin remediation processes before they occur.

19. Nmon: Monitor Linux Performance

Nmon (stands for Nigel’s performance Monitor) tool, which is used to monitor all Linux resources such as CPU, Memory, Disk Usage, Network, Top processes, NFS, Kernel and much more. This tool comes in two modes: Online Mode and Capture Mode.

The Online Mode, is used for real-time monitoring and Capture Mode, is used to store the output in CSV format for later processing.

20. Collectl: All-in-One Performance Monitoring Tool

Collectl is a yet another powerful and feature rich command line based utility, that can be used to gather information about Linux system resources such as CPU usage, memory, network, inodes, processes, nfs, tcp, sockets and much more.

We would like to know what kind of monitoring programs you use to monitor performance of your Linux servers? If we’ve missed any important tool that you would like us to include in this list, please inform us via comments and please don’t forget to share it.

I am Ravi Saive, creator of TecMint. A Computer Geek and Linux Guru who loves to share tricks and tips on Internet. Most Of My Servers runs on Open Source Platform called Linux. Follow Me: Twitter, Facebook and Google+

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You should replace Nagios with Naemon. Nagios is dying and has been more or less stale in 2 years. Naemon is the vital fork to which all the developers left. Naemon is backwards compatible with Nagios.

Good Article, and a very informative post. I recently came across a very affordable and easy to use Linux server monitoring tool. I would, however, like to add SeaLion (https://sealion.com/) under Linux server Monitoring Tool.

I currently use this tool to keep an eye on my servers. It is also cloud based, easy to install and the metrics are displayed very neatly. It’s not very popular but it’s worth a mention.

The Debian GNU/Linux OS includes a piece, the kernel, which is Linux. Other OSes also exist that use the same kernel (such as Android and more traditional distributions like Fedora or Ubuntu), and others that use different kernels(e.g. OpenBSD, Windows, MacOS).